Social networks provide a convenient way for a large number of people to interact with each other. The evolution of social networks has resulted in increased sharing of large multi-media files (e.g., music files, photographs, and videos) and thus in increased memory usage. For example, volatile memory becomes a bottleneck while waiting for writes to non-volatile memory (e.g., flash memory) to be performed when downloading files, since write to non-volatile memory are much slower than writes to volatile memory.
One solution for improving performance is to significantly increase the amount of volatile memory in the mobile device. But this would cause the devices to be prohibitively expensive.
Garbage collection is a form of automatic storage management which allows for portions of memory occupied with objects that are no longer referenced to be reclaimed. In some systems, however, garbage collection alone may not sufficiently or optimally free up memory.